“Our test facilities can’t reach the combination of heat flux, pressure, shear stresses, etc., that an actual reentering spacecraft does. We’re always having to wait for the flight test to get the final certification that our system is good to go.”—Jeremy VanderKam, deputy manager for Orion’s heat shield, speaking in 2022 On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and th...

“It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.” ― The Lord of the Rings Now that I've explored the north island of New Zealand, it was time to head over to what many describe as "the better island". Initially, I had planned to stay in Christchurch for two nights, take a bus to Twizel, and borrow a small camper van from a friend. As these things go, the car engine broke a week before my arrival. Even though the peak season was coming to an end, the accommodation and rental car situat...

In theory, a universe can come in any shape or size, but scientists prefer to think about three basic kinds of universes: one that’s expanding, one that’s collapsing, and one that stays the same. Out of these three simplified models, an expanding universe is the hardest for physicists to understand. Yet it’s exactly the one our real world most resembles. When physicists calculate what’s going on… Source In theory, a universe can come in any shape or size, but scientists prefer to th...

Before we begin, I’m glad to note that my Indian Space Progress reports completed three years last month, and have crossed 10,000 globally spread readers. Thank you very much for reading and supporting the only such overarching coverage of India’s space activities over and above my flagship Moon Monday writing. 🚀 The LVM3 rocket behind the clouds during the launch of Chandrayaan 3. Image: Dheeraj Khandelwal This article is part 3 of my ongoing series on India’s launch vehicle cr...

Posted to Indienews I'm hosting the IndieWeb Book Club for next month. I've picked the first fiction book so far: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. Wikipedia | OpenLibrary What do a dead cat, a computer whiz-kid, an electric monk who believes the world is pink, quantum mechanics, a chronologist more than 200 years old, Samual Taylor Coleridge (poet), and pizza have in common? Apparently, not much… until Dirk Gently, self-styled private investigator, s...

A couple of years ago I posted a list of student projects I’d be interested in supervising. Here’s what’s happened since: Project Status Altruism in Software Teams undone Browsercast partially Validity of Claims in progress The Impact of Calibrated Code Review undone Code Selectors undone Simulations of Distributed Systems done Developer Discussions undone Dragnet undone Drawing Execution Order undone ...

Years ago, when I was in college, I had one of those friends who never quite had it together. You know the type; I'm talking lost a debit card and took three months to get a new one because of some sort of "mixup" with the credit union that I think consisted mostly of not calling them for three months. In the mean time, our mutual friend ended up in a quandry: at WalMart, at one in the morning, with a $2 purchase and no cash. Well, this was no problem for that particular space case: he had his c...

The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the Florida sky. Commander Young and Pilot Crippen were at the controls as the Shuttle ascended on its first flight. But the launch, like much of the flight, was really under the control of four computers in the avionics bays one deck below the crew. A fifth computer stood ready to take over in case of a catastrophic computer malfunction. These computers, Model...

Last week I talked about personally-identifiable information (PII) in the context of a data breach . It reminded me of the three questions I always ask in relation to PII: Do I need this PII ? It’s impossible to leak data you don’t hold. Is my collection, holding, and processing of this PII legal and responsible ? This includes requests to have said data removed. Am I transparent about what PII I have collected? These should be simple to answer. If you run a busin...

Every time I have ever explained the Boyer-Moore majority element algorithm to someone, people have reliably found it very charming. So now I'm going to explain it to you. The problem is this: we have an array of elements which we are told possesses a majority element . That is, an element which occurs more than half the time. We would like to figure out what that element is. There's couple obvious solutions, like, build a map of all the counts, then iterate over that map at the end and fin...

Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox , a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here's how he describes it in the model card : Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library . The model has absolutely no training inputs from after 1899 — the vocabulary and ideas are formed exclu...

Consider the following problem. You have a large set of strings, maybe millions. You need to map these strings to 8-byte integers ( uint64 ). These integers are given to you. If you are working in Go, the standard solution is to create a map. The construction is trivial, something like the following loop. m := make ( map [ string ] uint64 , N ) for i , k := range keys { m [ k ] = values [ i ] } One downside is that the map may use over 50 bytes per ent...

My Olympus OM-20, fitted with a stack of 7mm, 14mm, and 25mm extension rings. I’ve been curious about macrophotography for a while, and recently I got hold of some extension rings for my OM-20 to give it a try. I took them out with me on one of the first properly sunny days of the year, and snapped these photos I’m quite pleased with. Both were shot handheld, using the 7mm and 25mm extension rings for a combined 32mm extension. 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 50mm f /1.8 + 32mm extension ...

I've been seeing talk around about wanting to capitalize on the AI bubble popping and picking up server GPUs for pennies on the dollar so they can play games in higher fidelity due to server GPUs having more video ram. I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but most of those enterprise GPUs don't have the ability to process graphics. Yeah, that's right, in order to pack in as much compute as possible per chip, they removed video output and graphics processing from devices we are cal...

In February I left my employer after nearly two decades of service. In the moment I was optimistic, yet unsure I made the right choice. Dust settled, I’m now absolutely sure I chose correctly. I’m happier and better for it. There were multiple factors, but it’s not mere chance it coincides with these early months of the automation of software engineering . I left an employer that is years behind adopting AI to one actively supporting and encouraging it. As of March, in my professional c...

Super Sport SS18 Glider yacht, via DesignBoom . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at plastic price jumps, crypto-backed mortgages, a proposed AI data center pause, US battery manufacturing, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran The disruption to oil and LNG supplies caused by the closure of the Strait of Hor...

Switch, map of functions, and interface registry for dispatching in Go. Switch, map of functions, and interface registry for dispatching in Go.

TL;DR; After migrating three production Python web apps from MongoEngine to the Raw+DC database pattern, I measured nearly 2x the requests per second, 18% less memory, and gained native async support. Raw+DC delivered real-world performance gains, not just synthetic benchmarks. About a month ago, I wrote about a new design pattern I’m seeing gain traction in the software space: Raw+DC: The ORM pattern of 2026 . This article generated a lot of interest and a lot of debate. The short versi...

OSLO – (March 30, 2026) – The Royal Netherlands Navy (RNLN) has declared Shield AI’s V-BAT unmanned aircraft system (UAS) operational following testing aboard the HNLMS Johan de Witt, which was operating off the coast of northern Norway. V-BAT supports the RNLN efforts to increase maritime domain awareness using unmanned systems, with 12 V-BATs being acquired by the RNLN. Eight RNLN vessels will be equipped with the equipment necessary to support V-BAT operations. “With operations rang...

Back in November I pre-ordered an Ollee Watch , which was delivered in February. After playing with the watch, I decided I didn't want it, so I posted it up on eBay - never worn, so brand new. A week or so later it sold and I posted it off to its new owner. A day or 2 later, the buyer messaged me saying the backlight wasn't working. This immediately raised my suspicions as the watch was brand new and I had packaged it up well. Anyway, I gave them the benefit of the doubt after they had se...

Yesterday, Michał Sapka , Poland's favourite blogger according to a certain Australian posted on the Fediverse a toot about human.json . human.json is intended to be a way of presenting that this specific website is written by humans, not AI. It also allows to vouch for other websites, that the author of this one knows that those other websites are also written by humans. I would call it a reputation based system of proving a website's human origins (how creepy does it sound, doesn't it...

A new JavaScript library pretext for fast text measuring / layout popped up on social media. Potentially interesting given its focus on speeding up text rendering in web apps and me writing web apps and liking them being fast. I looked at the code and saw a function isCJK() . Given my 3 decades of programming and performance optimization, it looked like it could be sped up. This is a story about ideas on making JavaScript faster and the process of quickly implementing and benchmarkin...

Occasionally I run into what I consider fun problems in complexity, that require just a little bit of out of the box thinking. They require some background in theory, but nothing too deep. Some of these problems have been mentioned before on my blog or social media. A language \(L\) is commutative if for all \(u\),\(v\) in \(L\), \(uv=vu\). Show that \(L\) is commutative if and only if \(L\) is a subset of \(w^*\) for some string \(w\). The "only if" direction is surprisingly tricky. Let an NP m...